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The official Corot is generally a bore. The nymphs, shepherds and Sileni who decorate the big classical landscapes of his middle years are inert and stereotyped. He didn't have the temperament for the sensuousness Poussin put in his classical scenes; Corot's nymphs are just studio models. In Bacchante with a Panther, 1860, the girl teasing the big cat with what appears to be a dead starling looks like Mlle. Goosepimple, thanks to the gray French skies above and the damp earth under her bottom.
Corot was much better at trees than people, let alone pagan divinities. His weakest drawings are of the figure, his strongest of vegetable nature--one especially, an ink drawing of creepers on a rock done around 1827, has a wiry inquisitorial line and a fierce truth to the motif that remind one, without exaggeration, of Durer. In landscape his hand roamed free, giving the foreground hill in Volterra, the Citadel, 1834, a lively splotching of indeterminate dark scrub whose excited marks carry more visual weight than the distant hill town. But his early portraits are maladroit Ingres, and he was almost incapable of bringing off large biblical or literary compositions: his late painting of Dante and Vergil menaced by the she-wolf at the edge of the Dark Wood has to be one of the most bathetic illustrations for the Inferno ever made--not only the animals but the poets themselves look stuffed.
And yet in his last years, from 1865 or so until his death, Corot produced an exquisite series of small figure paintings, mostly of young women sitting before the easel in the brown clutter of his studio. Some remind you of Chardin, others are prophecies of Whistler. Interrupted Reading, circa 1870-73, is strikingly modern in its broadly painted triangular planes of muted color, regulated by two patches of black--the model's hair and her bodice--and relieved only by some red coral beads. Its Raphaelesque formal clarity looks back to neoclassicism but also forward to Picasso's dropsical women. It shows that, for Corot, the lessons of Italy never ended.